My Tattoo Is Meaningless

My tattoo is meaningless. The dragon? It’s just a dragon. The old man riding the dragon who looks like my late grandfather? Total coincidence.

The stampeding horses are likewise without meaning, as are the copies of “The Communist Manifesto” that they’re trampling. Yes, the horses are all wearing Che Guevara T-shirts. No, that does not imbue my tattoo with any deeper message about the ironic commodification of Marxist ideals. In fact, I don’t know what those last several words mean.

I just wanted a tattoo, O.K.?

The Grim Reaper part—where the Grim Reaper is holding a sickle in one hand and an hourglass in the other, and there’s a speech bubble coming out of his head that reads, “Death is a part of life, and everyone needs to understand that simple fact”—means nothing.

Wherever I go, people try to decode my tattoo, which takes up the entirety of my back, chest, right thigh, neck, and arms. It’s so frustrating! I got it because I thought it would look cool. It has nothing to do with my “journey” or my “path” or my “decision to get drunk and walk into a tattoo parlor.”

Speaking of which—no, the Jim Beam logo on my left forearm does not mean that I like Jim Beam bourbon, so please stop buying me shots of it. I’m more of a cake-flavored-vodka guy.

Here are some other parts of my tattoo that don’t symbolize anything: the orchid; the lighthouse; the dove clutching the olive branch while soaring in front of the big peace sign; the Portuguese flag; the opening paragraphs of “The Great Gatsby” that get smaller and eventually illegible as they descend down my hip and run into the Scorpio design; the Scorpio design; the four-leaf clover; and my son’s birthdate.

There are no tea leaves to read here, people.

This next part of my tattoo is one that I get asked about a lot. I think it turned out really well! It’s a man looking in the mirror, but the reflection staring back at him is much older. Wiser, perhaps, but withered and decaying. What is the older man trying to convey to the younger? Is he telling him to savor every moment of life? To plan for the future? To understand that the passing of time is inevitable and not to be feared?

No.

People are always so eager to see things that aren’t there. They look at your tattoo and automatically start making assumptions about you— that you served in the Navy, that you belong to the Hell’s Angels, that Tony the Tiger must have some sort of deep personal significance for you.

I didn’t, I don’t, and he just seems like he’d be a fun guy to have a beer with, all right?

Analogy, metaphor, symbolism—these are just fancy words for lies. But try telling that to the guy I met at a bar last week. He kept droning on about the 1986 Celtics just because I have their entire roster tattooed on my neck, as if that somehow makes me familiar with the team or with even the most basic rules of basketball.

Actually, I hadn’t even known they played basketball.

Sometimes I think about getting parts of my tattoo removed, like all the depictions of Donald Trump. The one where he and the Statue of Liberty lovingly embrace, for instance, or the one where he battles the Norse god Odin with a flaming axe. I occasionally wonder, Was it the wrong decision to get these?

But I keep them. Sure, they’re a part of who I am, of what I put out into the world, but, just like the rest of my tattoo, they don’t mean anything.